The great demand for a reliable multimedia transmission over wireless connections present vast challenges to engineers. Usually, video media requires high transmission rate with delay constraints. Moreover, the media is transmitted over a broadcast channel such as in streaming TV channels, or over a multicast channel such as in transferring videos that are encapsulated in a large file for numerous users. The nature of these channels, in addition to the delay constraints, excludes the option of having a feedback channel to acknowledge the transmission success. Consequently, in such scenarios, an alternative technique is required to guarantee the reliability of transmission.
The Wireless Gigabit Alliance specification (WiGig) is directed to a multi-gigabit speed wireless communications technology. As such, WiGig enables high performance wireless data, display, and audio applications that supplement the capabilities of today's wireless LAN (local area network) devices. The technical specifications of WiGig are disclosed in TWG-2010-0574-00-WGA-D08: “WiGig WGA specifications” and are hereby incorporated by reference.
However, the WiGig specification does not allow the use of an automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme during the broadcast\Multicast transmission. Moreover, in time sensitive applications (e.g. multimedia, gaming, and so forth), ARQ is not the most efficient error control scheme, especially when the channel suffers long outages and high packet loss rate caused by blockage and a relatively slow beamforming algorithm. In the absence of the ARQ feedback, the physical layer forward error correcting (PHY FEC) codes cannot provide enough protection to achieve low packet loss rate (approximately 10−5). As such, it is necessary to have a second FEC scheme to reduce the packet loss rate.